What Our Marathon Meant

Crowds on Boylston Street watched Antti Viskari of Finland cross the finish line to win the 60th Boston Marathon in April 1956. Onlookers came from all over the city then, not all over the world.CreditCreditJohn G. Zimmerman/Sports Illustrated — Getty Images

GROWING up in Boston in the 1950s and early ’60s, I suffered, like a lot of people back then, from a civic inferiority complex. Our hometown, we knew, was the Hub only in old newspaper headlines; the real center of the universe was New York.

But we took some small satisfaction in knowing that we had two things New Yorkers did not. We had Patriot’s Day, and we had a marathon — or, rather, the marathon, because except for the one run by Pheidippides, who had ever heard of another? Before marathons were commodified the way they are now, one pretty much the same as the next, our race, which began in 1897, seemed uniquely Bostonian. It was classical in origin; it was a little odd; and in our sports-mad town, where fandom was practically a religion, it was another occasion that summoned forth the congregation.

To schoolchildren, Patriot’s Day was an unexpected gift — a spring holiday that popped up right around Easter, when you thought you were done with vacations, and that brought with it no particular obligation. You didn’t have to go to church or pay homage to dead presidents or worry about getting caught with your illegal firecrackers. If you were lucky enough to have tickets, you could go watch the Red Sox at the decadent and unnatural hour of 11 a.m. and, when the game was over, head down to Kenmore Square and watch the marathoners. Or if you lived, as I did, in Brighton, not far from the bottom of Heartbreak Hill, where the marathon course made a sweeping left turn onto Beacon Street, you could amble out of your house and watch grown-ups lope past in what appeared to be their underwear.

Back then, most people did not run for fun or for exercise or for any other reason if they could help it, and so there was something pleasingly eccentric about the marathon — a once-a-year springtime festival not of misrule, exactly, but of routines temporarily suspended. The students at Wellesley, in their knee socks and Bermudas, spilled out of the dorms to cheer on the runners, and so did the sweatshirted boys from Boston College (still all male), a few miles down the road. Families like mine gathered in small knots, watched and clapped for a while and then went home when the novelty wore off. No one cared too much about who was in the lead because, except for Johnny Kelley, no one knew who any of the runners were.

Johnny Kelley was a Boston native (West Medford) and marathon fixture who ran in the race every year until he was 84. He won in 1935 and 1945 and finished in the top five more than a dozen times. By the time I was watching, he had fallen back more toward the middle of the pack, but with his shy smile and rolling, slightly bowlegged stride, he was still a beloved and instantly recognizable figure. He fascinated my father, who like so many of his generation felt he had gotten all the exercise he needed during the war and wanted only to put in his eight hours on the job and then putter in the basement.

Kelley, had we only known it, was the face of the future, of subsequent generations who took fitness seriously and ran long distances as if there were nothing to it, and he lived long enough to see the marathon transformed into the world-famous event it is now, with tens of thousands of competitors and hundreds of thousands more thronging the street to watch. In Kelley’s heyday the winner received no money. The prize was a medal, a laurel wreath, just like the ones they awarded in ancient Greece, and a bowl of beef stew. That, too, seemed uniquely Bostonian: a classy little Brahmin touch followed by a reminder that we don’t get fancy and above ourselves here.

In the aftermath of Monday’s bombing, a number of people, including President Obama, remarked that Boston was a tough and resilient place. That could have been an empty cliché — when is the last time you heard someone say that such-and-such a place was a city of sissies? — except that Boston really is tough, and not entirely for noble reasons. It’s a toughness born in part of that no-nonsense, beef-stew sensibility but also from a history of neighborhood clannishness, class resentment, and racial and ethnic prejudice — of an attitude that people here take care of their own because you can’t trust anyone else to.

THE marathon was an antidote to that kind of isolation. It linked the city, its neighborhoods and suburbs, together, like beads on a string. The course, if you think about it, traces in reverse order the history of Boston and its expansion, starting in Hopkinton, once semirural, and then threading its way east for 26 miles through the tony suburbs of Wellesley, Newton and then, right about where I lived, heading downtown, past two-family homes and apartment buildings, cutting through Brookline, another well-to-do town, and into Back Bay, in my day not nearly as chichi as it is now. The crowd greeting the runners at the finish didn’t come from all over the world, the way it does now, but from all over the city, gathered in a one-day truce.

And even when it became such a celebrated occasion, an international event rather than a strictly Bostonian one, the marathon still retained some of that early eccentric quality. It was still a festival, a rite of spring as much as an athletic event. It was still free for spectators, who could come and go as they pleased, without tickets. It was still open to anyone — or to anyone who could qualify — and the course still passed right by people’s front yards.

After Monday’s cruel and senseless bombing, Bostonians kept insisting that the marathon would go on, and no doubt it will, but it won’t be the same. There won’t be the same sense of freedom and lightness, the recollection of strait-laced Bostonians stripping down to their skivvies and running around in front of their cheering neighbors because it was spring and it felt good. Standing in the crowd we may high-five the fellow next to us, but we’ll also sneak a look at him and wonder who he is, where he’s from and what he’s thinking, and he’ll be wondering the same of us.